I was recently using Slack, the team-based messaging app, when a bad link sent me to this wryly amusing 404 page:
This is an in-joke within an in-joke, because this is art from (and a reference to) Glitch, the web-based MMO founded by Stewart Butterfield a few years ago. Thing is, Glitch suffered an untimely death at the end of 2012, but something else emerged in the process of creating and managing it*:
Then in 2009, Butterfield founded Tiny Speck, pulling in game vets like Journey’s Robin Hunicke and Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahasi, to launch a browser-based online game called Glitch. Beloved by many—but ultimately not enough—fans, Glitch shuttered in 2012. But again a seed grew. Butterfield transitioned some of Tiny Speck’s staff, alongside some hard-learned lessons about onboarding new users to build a commercial communication tool that Tiny Speck had used to build Glitch. Last August, Slack was launched as an “email killer” and a way to transform how businesses talk and do work together.
"E-mail killer" is a bold statement, but it's definitely true that at this point, if you work in tech, you are almost certainly using Slack. Countless tech companies large and small utterly depend on Slack now. So while Glitch's small but passionate userbase (many of whom jumped over from Second Life) mourned the passing of the world they'd come to love, there's an ironic but sweet coda to that passing:
While Glitch the virtual community is gone, it led to the birth of Slack, which is basically a virtual community for companies. And maybe one day soon, Slack will help one of those companies birth the next great virtual world.
*(By the way, this is actually the second time Butterfield gave a second life to a second life, so to speak -- this is also pretty much how Flickr was created.)
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